DESIGN AND ENGINEERING AUTOMATION
Download the Design Automation Training sheet
What is design automation?
Design automation is the practice of capturing engineering rules, product logic and design knowledge in software, so that a configured product can generate its own 3D models, 2D drawings and parts lists from a set of input parameters, instead of an engineer drawing every variant by hand. It is also called engineering design automation or CAD automation.
It is not the same as drawing faster. The point is that the knowledge sits in the model rather than in the heads of a few senior engineers, so the hundredth variant costs roughly the same to produce as the first one. For engineer-to-order and configure-to-order manufacturers, that is the difference between quoting in weeks and quoting in minutes.
What a design automation setup typically produces:
- 3D models and assemblies, generated per order
- 2D production drawings with correct dimensions and tolerances
- Bills of materials ready for ERP
- Manufacturing data such as DXF files, cutting lists and CNC output
- Technical documentation, specifications and quote material
Engineering Process
We recognise that engineering in complex manufacturing environments is difficult – driven by legacy systems, product variations, and knowledge that is often hard to scale. That’s why we work directly with your engineers, side by side, to simplify product structures and reduce unnecessary complexity in day-to-day engineering work. We’ve done this many times in large and small organizations with highly specialized products. Even when it seems like a product cannot be standardized or automated, we consistently find a practical way forward. The result is less manual work, fewer errors, and a more scalable way of handling complex products.
Scandinavian Digital is an official Tacton Sales and Services Partner. We work with Tacton Design Automation across SOLIDWORKS, Autodesk Inventor and PTC Creo, alongside our own configuration platform CONFIG2.
How design automation works
Every design automation project goes through the same four moves, whatever the product is and whatever CAD system it lives in.
1. Understand the product portfolio. Before anything is automated, the product has to be understood as a system: which variants exist, which rules actually govern them, and where engineering hours are spent today. This is where modularisation and product structure work begins, and it is usually where the real gains are found.
2. Capture the engineering knowledge. The decisions an experienced engineer makes without thinking about them, which plate thickness at which load, which motor for which throughput, which weld is allowed where, are written down as explicit rules and constraints.
3. Build the master model. One parametric model is built to cover the whole variant space, driven by those rules. A single model replaces hundreds of near-identical files.
4. Connect the inputs and the outputs. Parameters come in from a product configurator, a CPQ quote, an ERP order or a simple form. Models, drawings, bills of materials and documents come out, automatically and consistently.
The hard part is rarely the software. It is step one and step two, and that is why we start with engineering breakdown workshops rather than with a CAD licence. You can see what the output looks like in our demo library.
Standardisation, modularisation and parametrisation
These three words come up in every design automation project, and they are not interchangeable.
- Standardisation is deciding that something should only be done one way. One bolt pattern instead of nine, one way of dimensioning a weld, one naming convention. It reduces the number of cases the rules have to cover.
- Modularisation is breaking the product into interchangeable building blocks with defined interfaces, so a module can be changed or reused without redesigning everything around it.
- Parametrisation is making the geometry itself driven by values. A tank height is not a line someone drew, it is a number the model reads and rebuilds from. Without parametrisation there is nothing for the rules to act on.
Most products need all three, and roughly in that order: standardise what should not vary, modularise what should, and parametrise what has to scale.
Our work typically focuses on
Modularisation
Breaking products into reusable building blocks to reduce repetitive engineering.
Product structure redesign
Building clean, rule-based master models that can generate variants automatically.
Standardization of rules and logic
Aligning product definitions so they can be reused, scaled, and maintained over time.
Product portfolio understanding
Identifying where engineering effort is highest and where automation creates real value.
Engineering breakdown workshops
Working directly with your engineers to uncover constraints, exceptions, and opportunities for simplification.
Solving tomorrow’s challenges today
- Repeatability is difficult, fire and forget
- Knowledge drain, impossible to contain engineering know how
- Quality, getting customer requirements right every time
- Bottlenecks, endless feedback loops slowing everything down
- Scaling, growth blocked by limited resources
- Operations, too expensive to run manually
- Lead Time (Quote, Engineering, Manufacturing)
- Transparency, no single source of truth and no intelligence to react whensomething changes
The six value areas
1. Lead time
88% reduction in lead time (Hours, days and weeks)
2. Additional sales
25 – 30% more sales after 3 years (Revenue of sales)
3. Cost of quality
50-65% savings in cost of quality (Number of incidents and errors)
4. Costs of hours
75 – 90% savings during Order Execution
5. Cost of goods
5-10% savings in cost of goods sold – incl. shipping (COGS)
6. Digitalisation
Ensure that your product knowledge is captured and re-used
Design automation, CPQ and product configurators: what is the difference?
The three terms are used interchangeably in a lot of sales material, and they are not the same thing. They sit at different points in the same order flow, and most manufacturers end up needing more than one of them.
| Type | What it does | Who uses it | What comes out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product configurator | Lets someone put together a valid combination of options, guided by product rules | Sales, dealers, end customers | A valid specification |
| CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) | Adds pricing, discounting, approval and quote generation on top of configuration | Sales and sales operations | A priced, approved quote |
| Design automation | Turns the specification into real engineering output | Engineering and production | 3D models, drawings, bills of materials, manufacturing data |
In practice they are links in one chain. A customer configures, CPQ prices and quotes, and design automation produces what the factory needs in order to build it. Scandinavian Digital works across all three, with Tacton CPQ and Tacton Design Automation as well as our own configuration platform CONFIG2.
Which CAD systems we automate
We build design automation on SOLIDWORKS, Autodesk Inventor and PTC Creo, and we have delivered more than 200 complex CAD automation solutions across the three. Which platform a project runs on is normally decided by what the engineering department already works in, not by the automation tooling.
Scandinavian Digital is an official Tacton Sales and Services Partner, so a project can be built on Tacton Design Automation, on our own platform CONFIG2, or on a combination, depending on how the product and the surrounding systems look.
Is your product a candidate for design automation?
Design automation pays off fastest when several of these are true:
- The product is sold in many variants of the same basic design
- Engineering has to touch most orders before they can be manufactured
- Quoting takes days or weeks, because it waits for engineering
- The same calculations and the same drawings are redone with small changes
- A handful of people hold knowledge nobody else can apply
- Errors are found late, in production or at the customer
If none of them are true, the product is probably standard enough that there is little for automation to work with. If three or more are true, there is almost always a case worth measuring.
Generated models and drawings only create value once they reach the systems that act on them, which is the job of IT integration, and once the bought-in part of the product follows the same rules through supplier integration.
Design automation: frequently asked questions
CAD is the tool an engineer draws in. Design automation is a layer of rules on top of CAD that makes the drawing happen by itself. You still need CAD, you just stop using it to redraw the same thing.
It depends on how well the product is understood before the work starts. A focused pilot on one product family is typically measured in weeks, a full rollout across a portfolio in months. The time goes into mapping rules and cleaning up product structure, not into the software.
No. It removes the repetitive part of the job, the variants that are mostly the same, so engineering time goes to new development and to the orders that genuinely need a person. In most of the companies we work with, the engineering department ends up doing more, not less.
Yes. The output of a design automation setup, bills of materials, item numbers, drawings and documents, is normally written straight into ERP or PLM. That integration is usually part of the project rather than something that comes afterwards.
That is the most common objection, and it is almost never completely true. Products that look fully bespoke usually turn out to have a stable core with variation around the edges. The engineering breakdown workshop exists to find where that line actually sits.
The six value areas above show the ranges we see in practice: up to 88 percent shorter lead times, 75 to 90 percent fewer hours in order execution, and 50 to 65 percent lower cost of quality. Where a specific company lands depends on how much of the order flow goes through engineering today.